Box.net; Enterprise-ready Document Collaboration for iPhone

by Bill French on 16/07/09 at 12:01 am

Bill French is an information architect specializing in Internet applications. He is also the co-founder of MyST Technology Partners and Senior Editor for iPhoneCTO.

Of the 65,000+ iPhone apps available, I use about a dozen all the time; Box is one of them. Box (Box.net) is one of those apps that was created by people that are instinctively inside your head. At every level, they seem to have your business requirements nailed. Publishing, storing, sharing, and managing documents is made effortless, seamless, and highly productive with Box. Along with its team support – the ability to invite collaborators into document spaces – there’s an excellent iPhone application that’s intuitive, but simple enough to use on-the-fly.

Architecture

Clearly, this is a cloud-based service. Regardless of the platform environment I happen to be working in (Mac, PC, or iPhone), Box makes it easy to upload and manage resources. Not surprisingly, Box resources are always available and always in synch because it is a unified information repository approach with distributed clients including a fully functional web interface. It resolves the “who’s in control issue”, providing a reliable and always-on service.

It’s also clear that the designers thought very carefully about security and extensibility. Many of the products in this genre build the security model and the integration approach after-the-fact. Box designers have expended a significant amount of effort planning and anticipating requirements for SMB’s but also enterprises.

Many other products provide similar solutions. Basecamp (for example) assumes documents are an attachment to other knowledge artifacts such as milestones and messages. They take the position that knowledge work is message-centric. Box takes the opposite side of the same coin – conversations, comments, etc should be attached to documents (or folders of document collections). Both approaches work well depending on how your project teams and organization regard documents. It’s safe to say that if your teams are document-centric (which most are), Box provides right architecture.

Sharing and Team Productivity

Shared workspaces (or project folders) are managed at a granular level meaning it is possible to create a shared space at any folder level of your document library. This makes it possible to share collections of folders, documents or specific documents. Teams will find shared workspaces ideal for creating and managing collaborative assets such as spreadsheets and presentations.

One area where Box excels is in the area of file locking and revision management. For teams it is essential to use a file locking mechanism to avoid overwriting changes and maintaining document integrity. Teams also require commenting separate and apart from the documents themselves. Box provides the ability for teams to discuss documents and have conversations related to a specific document or a collection of documents.

Situational Awareness

Of all the technologies available to businesses in the Web 2.0 era, notifications is the most ignored and underutilized advantage that can pay the biggest dividends. Situational awareness is a key success factor in moving the ball forward for teams that work in environments where the pace of change is rapid and review cycles are critically short.

Box provides notifications as content is uploaded, downloaded, or edited. Everyone on the team gets notified through the Updates tab and through email, thus increasing response time and decreasing the lag from concept to finalized content.

Integration With OpenBox

Box provides a robust and seamless gateway to integrate services that are relevant to document management through a plugin architecture. Plugins are special Web 2.0 integrations that make it possible for third-party applications to play inside the Box document repository.

OpenBox includes a service called EchoSign, free web service that allows you to send, approve and sign contracts electronically, on the web. This is very useful for obtaining sign-off on important agreements. EditGrid is another OpenBox integration that provides a fully featured online spreadsheet editor supporting Excel, Open Office, Open Document, CSV, Star Office, etc. OpenBox plugins also exist for eFax, Twitter, and Scribd.

With the iPhone launch of Documents to Go, and other iPhone-enabled products such as QuickOffice, the horizon for real mobile document creation and collaboration through iPhone is escalating. Combined with technologies such as WebDav, it’s likely we’ll soon see a more seamless experience and ease of transition as mobile users shift gears throughout a workday.

Social Media

Some documents are intended to be exposed publicly, and Box delivers on this requirement as well. With it’s direct integration to Scribd, you can quickly deploy new and updated documents from Box direct to Scribd. The Twitter plugin makes it simple work to tweet the existence and URL of a published document. And there’s even a plugin for posting into blogs. I’ve found great benefit sharing certain Box folders on Linkedin and Faxebook with specially built plugins. These social network plugins streamline the ability to update a collection of openly shared documents, whitepapers, and photos across many sites while managing change in just one space – Box.net.

iPhone App Shortfalls

I was disappointed that Box on the iPhone doesn’t support landscape viewing of documents. This is a hot button for me since I’m getting up there in years and my eyesight isn’t perfect. It supports double-tap and other gestures but no cut-copy-paste (Boooooo!).

There’s no apparent way to create collaboration comments about a document using the iPhone app. This is pretty important as well since when I’m away from the office I typically have brief moments where I can make comments.

I was also disappointed that they haven’t added sharing options for social networks in the iPhone app. This is important not only when I want to share notification about a newly updated paper to my followers, but I also want my collaborating colleagues who are shared into my project folders to be able to do the same. Social media participation is all about leveraging the broad base of your reachable audience. Making me wait to do that when I get back to a desktop is not what mobile computing is all about.

Upload – this is almost a show-stopper for me, but I understand why it’s difficult. The upload option in the iPhone allows you to pick files only from your photo library. What if I have some documents from other services such as QuickOffice, or Documents To Go ? I think the limitation is Apple’s own API – it’s possible to access files across application spaces, but only if Apple allows the developer to do this and by default, they disallow such integration. The workaround for this is to make sure your documents are unified and always make into box in the first place. Services such as Soonr promise this level of integrity.